virus

A couple of weeks ago, when Stephanie Voshell, an instructor of biological sciences in the College of Science, told her students that the lab portion of the course had ended, a resounding “No!” bellowed from the classroom.

This is because a group of Virginia Tech undergraduates have spent all fall facing the reality of research, with its unpredictable challenges and rewards, in order to discover viruses that infect bacteria.

These viruses, known as bacteriophages, are everywhere. They’re in the soil around us. They’re even in seawater. But, the amount and genetic makeup of these viruses – known simply as phages – are mostly unknown.

Knowing more about these tiny, spaceship-shaped life forms will provide insight into how phages work to alter the ecosystems where they are found. In seawater, for example, phages have been shown to destroy bacteria, which may alter how carbon is cycled. They may also play a role in how bacteria infect people or in the spread of mycobacterial infections, such as tuberculosis.

The students began the semester looking for phages around campus — near the Duck Pond, the Drillfield, the Hahn Horticulture Garden, and the lawn outside of Dietrick Dining Hall. Once found, the students honed their wet lab skills while growing and isolating their phages before meeting them close-up under a microscope. They then named their phages before entering them into the Actinobacteriophage Database, run by Graham Hatfull, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Two days from now on Thursday, Dec. 3, the students in this novel course, Phage Hunters, will reveal their newly discovered viruses in a poster session at 1 p.m. in the Fralin Hall atrium.

Whether these pathways are responsible for food intake, or pathways that viruses use as entryways to the host, Lee and his collaborators want to use these conduits to develop vaccines for humans and find ways for pigs to utilize feed more efficiently.

He collaborates with Lijuan Yuan, an associate professor of virology and immunology in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, to study norovirus and rotavirus, both of which cause gastroenteritis.

Their goal is to develop effective vaccines against norovirus gastroenteritis — a condition that is especially prevalent among elderly people and young children and is responsible for 56,000 to 71,000 hospitalizations and approximately 800 deaths per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Their work is conducted in a gnotobiotic pig facility at Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, where pigs are studied.

Lee said pigs display disease symptoms similar to humans and they also correlate to human health better than rodent vaccine testing models.

While Lee conducts research on pigs together with Yuan to develop vaccines, he is also making inroads in hog production.

“Basically I am a pig farmer,” said Lee. “I’m still interested in production. The question I am asking is how can I produce these animals at a high rate and with high efficiency.”

He is developing a way to design models that both agricultural and biomedical industries can utilize to increase profit margins.

Typically it takes two-and-a-half years to select for traits in pigs through conventional genetic engineering approaches, but Lee’s techniques shave two years from the process, which is helpful for agriculture specialists and pharmaceutical companies alike.

“That’s a huge difference,” said Lee. “In six months you have your model. The cost is lowered, and the low cost makes this kind of research practical for agriculture when it was not practical before.”

Lee believes the research will increase livestock production. By revealing pathways in charge of food intake, the animals can better metabolize feed to increase muscle mass.

Lee works in conjunction with Dr. Sherrie Clark, an associate professor of theriogenology — the study of the physiology and pathology of reproductive systems — in the Department of Large Animal Clinical Sciences. Her work in embryo transplantation has helped move the research forward.

Whether it’s biomedicine or hog production, Lee said the research in treating enteric viruses will itself be a pathway for research on more deadly viral diseases.

When Linsey Marr’s son was in day care, she said, “It seemed like we were getting a call every other week to come pick him up because he was sick.”

Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, was puzzled. On her trips to the daycare, she had seen the staff constantly wiping down surfaces, washing hands, and sterilizing any toys that ended up in a child’s mouth (no small feat in a room full of toddlers).

So why, with those scrupulously clean surfaces, were these kids still getting sick all the time?

Could it be the air?

She looked through the literature on the airborne transmission of common diseases like the flu. But she was surprised to find that there wasn’t any consensus on how much of the flu was spread through the air, or what environmental factors affected it.

So she took the question back to her lab, which already studied the way invisibly tiny particles in the air affect our health.

To learn what she found, and what she’s doing now, check out this article coming out Tuesday in VT News.

The daycare contagion conundrum wasn’t the first time Marr — who was recently featured in Popular Science — had noticed something in her world that others might have taken for granted, and turned it into a research question.

She’s an avid runner, and when she was in graduate school, she said, “I used to run by this big train depot, and I’d just be breathing that stuff — diesel exhaust — and I’m just thinking, ‘wow, am I killing myself? Is this actually a benefit for me to go running?’”

It was those questions that originally led her to study particulates in the air.

So these days, Marr is very aware — much more than the rest of us — of what’s getting sucked unnoticed into our lungs.

Has that made her nervous about, well, breathing? It’s “a little anxiety-inducing,” she admitted, but she’s been doing it for so long, she says, and she’s gotten used to it.
By Eleanor Nelsen, communications manager of the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science.